Reed 'quietly dangling' Variety for sale, says The Wrap

Reed Business Information's parent company "is under pressure to sell its magazines to get out from under a huge debt load," the story says. The company's public statements have been that it's keeping Variety. Meanwhile, former Hollywood Reporter publisher Robert Dowling writes that the trades, Variety and his previous home base, are struggling because they "lost sight of the 'community' they were designed to serve."

In 1988, when I began my career at the Hollywood Reporter, more than 70 percent of the world’s entertainment business emanated from within what could be called the “Hollywood Beltway,” a horseshoe-shaped, 150-square-mile geography, defined by Sony Pictures in the south, Warner Brothers, NBC, Universal Pictures and Disney to the north and Paramount Pictures in the east. That was Hollywood, not the 3,400 square miles of greater Los Angeles.

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The “community” is no longer that small geographic area on the West Side of Los Angeles. It is now a global “networked community.” Everyone is connected and everyone has access to everything. What happens in Europe, Asia and the developing world now counts and has to be listened to....[The trades] still operate as though the business is still essentially the West Side.

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